Tag: Castalia House

Rod Walker, Castalia author

I have been inexcusably remiss in failing to put Rod Walker’s site on the list of Castalia Author’s on the right sidebar. He not only has a blog, but it’s an interesting one, complete with links to reviews of his first book with Castalia as well as his reviews of other books, such as Peter Grant’s Western, Brings the Lightning.

Rod Walker says he enjoyed working with Castalia House to bring out MUTINY IN SPACE, and found it an excellent experience in all respects. In previous careers, RW dealt with several traditional publishers and a few small presses, and never found it an enjoyable experience, a marked contrast to his adventure with Castalia House. For all his low opinion of traditional publishers, RW thinks it is better to classify Castalia House as a “nontraditional” publisher. The Internet has made traditional publishing obsolete as a mode of organization, just as the rise of mass industry made the craft guild system obsolete as a method of economic production….

So the way forward for publishers, in RW’s opinion, is to abandon the gatekeeper function and instead become “nontraditional” publishers – that is, curators who seek out specific kinds of excellence. RW thinks that John C. Wright’s books SOMEWHITHER and IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY are superb fantasy novels, and in all probability these books would never have been published without Castalia, just as Jerry Pournelle’s THERE WILL BE WAR series would never have been revived.

I’m delighted to hear that Rod enjoyed working with us, as we’re very pleased to be working with him. He is one of the most professional authors in the industry, delivering what must be some of the cleanest manuscripts delivered anywhere. He’s not only professional, he’s prolific, as we’ll be publishing two more of his novels before the end of the year, Alien Game, which is a second Heinlein-style SF juvenile, and an as-yet-untitled fantasy novel set in Minaria, the world of Divine Right.

If you haven’t read his first SF juvenile, Mutiny in Space, you really should do so, as it is a fast-paced, old-school, true-Blue SF novel.

One of the things Castalia is building is a community of readers and writers, just as DevGame is the foundation for a community of gamers and game developers. As both the first DevGame game, Elveteka, and Rod’s third book with us shows, there is room for a considerable amount of overlap and cross-pollination; a DevGame team is already actively developing the computer wargame version of Divine Right and Castalia will be publishing the print edition of a Divine Right RPG book that is in the very early stages of development. This community-building is important, for as Dave Freer notes at the Mad Genius Club, the publishing world is rapidly changing.

The problem is our whole genre, all of publishing (both indy and traditional) and the business of writing are moving targets. Even the audience is moving and changing. And they’re not moving predictably, but like a cheetah full of amphetamine, LSD and blindfolded too.

Which is all rough on the painstaking ‘stalker’ – the author trying to set themselves up for the ‘kill’. It’s certainly resulted in some very wild shooting – some innocent bystanders hit, lots of prey (AKA sales) disappeared into the scrub never to be seen again. I mean, once upon a time you simply had to kiss up to the right editors, loudly espouse the correct SJW cause de jour and you were in every B&N from here to Timbuktu, and on NYT bestseller list… and life was sweet. Now you can do all that, impeccably, win a Nebula and a Hugo, and be in the surviving book-stores… and still be a sales failure. Readers are being considerably more difficult and relying on Amazon, are more price aware, and more inclined to sample on KU…. I think looking toward writer’s co-ops would be smart.

KU is the real game-changer now, because the traditional publishers can’t play there. But we can, and last month, one of our better-selling books sold more via KU than through all the other means and editions combined. It doesn’t make sense for us to sell all our books that way, as we’ve experimented and some books do great while others don’t, but KU editions are now every bit as important in their own right as paperback, hardcover, or audiobook editions.

As for coops and communities, we’re not the only ones who have noticed that building communities is vital for authors these days:

Most books today are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities. Everyone in the potential audiences for a book already knows of hundreds of interesting and useful books to read but has little time to read any. Therefore people are reading only books that their communities make important or even mandatory to read. There is no general audience for most nonfiction books, and chasing after such a mirage is usually far less effective than connecting with one’s communities.

This is why it is important for VP and Castalia to continue to grow – blog traffic looks likely to pass 2.6 million this month – and why it is equally important that Castalia does not grow at the price of sacrificing its level of quality. We only got one book out last month, but this month we expect to publish books by THREE new members of our writer’s community – Fenris Wulf, Ivan Throne, and Nick Cole – in addition to a first novel in a new series by one of our leading members, which is to say Mr. John C. Wright. Not all of these books will be for everyone, but all of them will be recognizably Castalia House books in their own way. We’ve also signed three new authors about whom we are very excited, but who shall remain anonymous for the present.

It is because this community is growing that it is increasingly under assault from trolls, self-seekers, and ideological missionaries. And it is because this community is important, and because you, the reader, are important, that the moderators and I are so ruthless in purging those who are attempting to disrupt and destroy it.

How important is it? We can quantify that. On an annual basis, the average Castalia book sells more than 10 times the number of copies of the average book. I expect that within five years, that ratio will be 100 to 1.

UPDATE: I didn’t look at the comments the first time around. Dave also had some nice things to say about Castalia there.

I seriously believe Castalia is merely one of the first of the new generation publishers. Say what you like about Vox Day – he pays 50%, does the legwork AND does the marketing. And he really does market. 50% of $20K (and no hassles and costs) is worth a lot more than 70% of $3K and hassles, costs. But at 17.5% of most of the Trad houses (apples to apples comparison) where they do the legwork, but scanty marketing but bump the price right up (so you might get $5K sales) well – it’s a no-brainer, really. Which is why I worry so much that so many people still choose that option.

We admittedly could do a lot better on the marketing. (And yes, marketing volunteers, I’m going to try to contact you this weekend. I’ve genuinely been so busy that I haven’t had time to even respond to the volunteers who are actively trying to help out.) But the quadpartite community of VP, AG, DG, and CH, in combination with our author’s networks, does have a marketing multiplier effect. And once a few of the bigger names start working with us – and they will – that’s when things are going to seriously take off.

UPDATE: One more note for established writers at other publishers who might be interested in talking to us about working together in the future. We not only pay much higher royalties much earlier than the traditional publishers do, this year, we are already paying all of our authors out for Q1 and Q2 2016, even though we haven’t been paid for June yet. I’m finishing the various reports this weekend. When we say our authors come first, we really mean it.

Submissions and so forth

Amanda addresses the business of submissions at Mad Genius Club:

Yesterday, as I was looking at FB, I came across a post from someone I respect a great deal. He also has one of the most unverifiable jobs there is in publishing. No, not reading the slush pile, although that is part of his job. He has taken it upon himself to do what so many publishers don’t do. He responds to those who send something in, letting them know whether or not their work has met the minimum threshold to be passed up the line for further consideration. Believe me, that is definitely more than a number of publishers do. Too many simply never get back to you unless they are interested.

What caught my eye with his post was how unprofessional someone had been in response to his email letting them know their story had not been passed up the line. Now, I know how it stings when you get a rejection. It’s like someone telling you your baby is ugly. But it happens and we have to accept it with grace and move on. Yes, we can kick and scream and curse in public but you do not send a note back telling the editor how wrong they were. Nor do you tell them that the title has been published during the time the editor was considering it, especially if the editor has gotten back to you in less than half the time they say it normally takes.

And that is where this particular author screwed up.

Having been on both ends of the process, perhaps some of you might be interested in an editor’s perspective.

  1. Most of the stuff that is submitted isn’t anywhere near ready. Seriously, we’re talking “WTF were you thinking” territory. Don’t submit just to submit, practice, then file it away if it’s not genuinely on par with what the publisher publishes and move on to the next work.
  2. You have VERY little time to impress the slush reader, who is wading through large quantities of writing that ranges from barely literate to mediocre. Make it count.
  3. Keep the cover letter short and to the point. No one is going to be impressed by how BADLY you want to be published or HOW MUCH you want to work with the publishing house. What you want has nothing to do with how good your book is.
  4. Pay a modicum of attention to whom you are submitting. If you submit a gay teen werewolf romance to Castalia, we’ll reject it right away. If you’re an SJW, don’t bother.
  5. Spellcheck, particularly your cover letter, bio, and first chapter. The occasional typo is forgivable, but if you simply can’t spell, most slush readers will quite reasonably assume you can’t write.
  6. Pay attention to who else the publisher publishes. Be familiar with some of their authors and read a few of their books to see how your work compares to them. At Castalia, our goal is for me to be the worst writer we publish. If your stuff isn’t objectively as good as my books, or Peter Grant’s, or Rod Walker’s, (and read the Amazon reviews to see how THOSE books are regarded) then you simply have no chance of being published by Castalia. Because John Wright and Owen Stanley and Nick Cole are even better.

All that being said, sometimes a submission does make it through the process. Last night I was discussing some editorial changes I wanted to see with the author of an unsolicited submission who hit several of our interest triggers with a solid, well-written murder mystery and political thriller set in feudal Japan that reads very much like military SF. If he can nail those changes, and I have no reason to think that he can’t, Castalia will be delighted to publish it.

Books and commenters

All right, so there is clearly a sufficient amount of interest in the concept of annotated classics from Castalia. This leads to the obvious next question: which classics and which commentators?

I think some variant of MMP’s P500 system might work here, where people can preorder a book but will not be charged for it until a certain number is hit, thereby triggering the production process. But before we can figure out what goes in the place of the 500, we’d need to determine what is of the most interest to the most people.

So far, we have the two combinations that I’d originally mentioned:

  • Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Vox Day
  • Clausewitz’s On War, Martin van Creveld
What other specific combinations would you like to see? We’ll need a list first, after which we can order the priority. Then I can talk to the various authors to see if they’d be interested.

UPDATE: While I’m flattered that a number of you are interested in my comments on various classics, if you consider that my plate is already rather full, it would probably be more practical to suggest other commentators.

On the Existence of Gods in audio

A #1 bestseller in the Atheism category, On the Existence of Gods is a response to a public challenge posed by a militant atheist who claimed to have never encountered any good arguments for the existence of gods. It is a competitive discourse between a Christian and an atheist, each of whom argue for their position on the subject, after which the arguments are adjudicated by a team of three judges – a Christian, an agnostic, and an atheist – before additional arguments are presented.

The format is compelling and the results are at times surprising, as the discussion takes unexpected twists and turns, while the judges exhibit ruthless impartiality as they criticize the arguments without mercy or favor. Vox Day, the author of The Irrational Atheist, presents the Christian perspective, while Dominic Saltarelli argues for the atheist position. The debate is wide-ranging and intelligent, but remains civil throughout, even as the momentum swings in favor of one side, and then the other.

Narrated by Jon Mollison, On the Existence of Gods is three hours and 22 minutes long. Click on the links or the cover image to listen to a sample.

There is a vast quantity of extant documentary and testimonial evidence providing indications that gods exist. This evidence dates from the earliest written records to current testimonials from living individuals. While it is true that the quality of this evidence varies considerably, it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand anymore than one can conclude Gaius Julius Caesar did not exist because one cannot see him on television today. Each and every case demands its own careful examination before it can be dismissed, and such examination has never been done in the overwhelming majority of cases.

For example, there are many documented cases of confirmed fraud in published scientific papers. If we apply the same reasoning to published scientific papers that some wish to apply to documentary evidence of gods, we have no choice but to conclude that all science is fraudulent. But this is absurd, as we know that at least some science is not fraudulent. Therefore, if one is willing to accept the validity of published scientific papers that one has not been able to verify are not fraudulent, one must similarly accept the validity of documentary evidence for the existence of gods that one has not examined and determined to merit dismissal for one reason or another.

Because it is intrinsically testimonial in nature, the documentary evidence for gods has been impugned on the basis of studies concerning the unreliability of eyewitness testimony for various reasons. However, this critical analogy actually demonstrates the precise opposite of what it purports to show. Since eyewitness testimony has been variously determined to be somewhere between 12 percent and 50 percent inaccurate, this means that between 50 percent and 88 percent of the testimonial evidence for gods should be assumed accurate, at least concerning the correctly reported details of the divine encounter. The correct interpretations of the specific details, of course, are a different matter.

There Will Be War Volume VI

Volume VI is now out! Seven down, two to go.

THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It featured some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II, and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Hide and Seek” in Volume III . Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VI is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 25 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battleground” by Gregory and James Benford, “The Eyes of Argos” by Harry Turtledove, “The Highest Treason” by Randall Garrett, “Crown of Thorns” by Edward P. Hughes, and “See Now, a Pilgrim” by Gordon Dickson. My personal favorite in this volume is “Nonlethal” by DC Poyer.

New Release subscribers, be sure to check your emails, as the bonus book is an especially good one this time around. Also, I’d like to encourage fans of the series to leave reviews for the benefit of those who are not familiar with it; some of the previous volumes are pretty scanty in this regard.

Two weeks

Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer, reviews Owen Stanley’s The Missionaries:

When I lived in Uganda there was an old joke that would routinely do the rounds:

“In Africa, what’s the difference between a tourist and a racist?”

Answer: “Two weeks.”

Occasionally I would recount this joke to a particularly inane group of Swedes who were about to depart for a gorilla trekking excursion into the remote Bwindi forest. They would get all self-righteous and mutter at my blatant prejudice and soon after they would depart. It was not uncommon to bump into them again after they had returned from their excursion.

“Ya, now your joke, we understands.”

Like all good jokes its premise is founded in truth and also of shared experience.

“The Missionaries,” by Owen Stanley, depicts a fictitious land known as Elephant Island, located somewhere in the confines of the Bismarck Sea, its people closely resembling the ways and mannerisms of Papua New Guinea. As colonialism no longer allows the natives to practice their favorite pastime of headhunting, the burden of keeping law and order falls to a small group of misfit expats, who despite their individual shortcomings, keenly understand the idiosyncrasies of the local population….

I have not enjoyed a novel as much as this in a very long time. In fact,
this novel could not have been published by the regular publishing
industry as it skewers the type of people who haunt that industry as
much as NGOs in misbegotten locales in the far corners of the globe. It
is a credit to Castalia House that the author has sought them out and I
sense that this will be a breakthrough work not just for Stanley but for
this small publishing house as well.

It appears his instincts are correct. Not only have we recently signed a number of new authors about whom we are extremely enthusiastic, but some of the existing authors have stepped up their game as well. Just as Mutiny in Space will not be our only SF juvenile and Brings the Lightning will not be our only Western, The Missionaries will not be our only literary satire.

Reviews of The Missionaries

Rawle Nynanzi reviews Owen Stanley’s satirical bestseller, The Missionaries:

When academic theories collide with practical reality, fun is had by all and sundry. The Missionaries is a hilarious book that will have you turning the page to see how badly a UN bureaucrat’s quest to modernize a distant tribe can go — and believe me, it goes really wrong. It shows the limits of the academic way of thinking while making you laugh all the way.

In the book, Dr. Prout is on a mission from the UN to develop the tribes of Elephant Island. As he does this, he finds himself going up against Roger Fletcher, a local administrator who prefers to let the tribes live as they always have, with him smoothing over any disputes. Despite Fletcher’s crude behavior and jokes about the natives’ culture, he clearly understands and respects them on a fundamental level. Dr. Prout, on the other hand, strides in like a know-it-all, spouting a mix of UN propaganda and left-wing orthodoxy while making no effort to understand the people in front of him. Most of the book’s humor comes from the collision of Fletcher’s practicality and Prout’s theoretical thinking…. I would proudly say that I loved the book. Highly recommended.

While you’re on Nyanzi’s site, I recommend having a look at his interesting take on proposition nations and the problem with them.

Some other comments about The Missionaries by reviewers.

  • A fun read that reminds me of Voltaire’s Candide.
  • This book is absolutely hilarious and a must buy. 6 stars out of 5.
  • I cannot praise the craftsmanship that went into the plot too highly; the entire novel is as tight-knit as a Chekov short story.
  • The way the bureaucrat reinterprets everything to fit his academic theories will leave you rolling on the floor.
  • HitchHikers Guide meets social justice warriors in a United Nations 3rd world development project.

I think it should now be clear that we have not exaggerated, in the least, how good this book is. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, you really, truly, should. When readers are openly comparing it to Voltaire, Chekov, and Douglas Adams, you know it is a classic-in-the-making.

Brings the Lightning now in paperback

As numerous people have been asking me the same question, let me be perfectly clear: ALL CASTALIA HOUSE BOOKS WILL APPEAR IN PRINT, SOONER OR LATER. As various facts on the ground have changed, we have modified our original ebook-mostly strategy accordingly and will now be publishing print editions of all our books.

To be specific, most books will appear in both hardcover and paperback in our standard size, 8.5 x 5.5. They will generally run from 12.99 to 16.99 for paperbacks and 19.99 to 24.99 for hardcovers, depending upon the pagecount. We will NOT be doing the Amazon matchbook thing because our ebooks come out first. Nor will we provide any information about when any given print edition will come out because there are too many factors to make any prediction meaningful.

Larger books, such as the There Will Be War omnibuses and the Selenoth books, will appear in both hardcover and paperback in our large size, 9.2 x 6.1. All hardcovers in both sizes will be casebound. Smaller books, like Mutiny in Space, will be paperback only, but will be collected in three-volume 8.5 x 5.5 hardcover omnibuses.

We are ramping up our print production capabilities thanks to our indefatigable Production Editor and a number of volunteers. As noted in the title, Brings the Lightning is now available in paperback for $12.99. The next books to appear in print editions will be:


Iron Chamber of Memory, John C. Wright (HC,PB)
Mutiny in Space, Rod Walker (PB)
CTRL ALT REVOLT!, Nick Cole (HC,PB)
The End of the World as We Knew It, Nick Cole (HC,PB)

All four of these books are expected to be available in July. At our current rate of production, we anticipate releasing two ebooks and four print books for a total of ten editions every month.

The Missionaries: a Marine’s review

The Dark Herald reviews Owen Stanley’s debut novel, The Missionaries:

This is a book that touched me more then I thought it would.  For most of my career in the Marine Corps, I was fighting nasty little low level insurgencies.  Honestly most of these had been going on before we showed up and continued after we left.  They were just run of the mill tribal conflicts that flared up and died down again of their accord when the world wasn’t looking.

But when the world was looking it was time to send in the Marines “Hoo-Rah!”  I didn’t mind overmuch.  It was a life of adventure and I was young enough and dumb enough to enjoy it.  It was why I joined the Corps in the first place.  And I am reasonably certain we did more good than harm.  The people we were dealing with understood, respected and even honored a warrior ethic.  We were comprehensible to them, even if the motives for our arrival looked pretty hazy to them

We made some effort to get to the know locals and listen to their problems and grievances.  Occasionally we would dig wells for them, which was usually appreciated.  Although they always wondered what it would cost them in the end.

Sadly what it would usually cost them was becoming a UN protectorate. 

The UN assessment teams that would follow on our heels…after we had settled things down naturally…were an inexplicable plague, the likes of which the poor bastards had never known. 

The best of the UN Poo-bahs had but one purpose and that was to make sure the UN got the credit for what we were doing.  The average ones would try to put us in UN Baby Blues, constantly lecture us on how to do our jobs and saddle us with insane Rules of Engagement, (bottom line don’t do anything gross like shoot back).  The worst of them would have had the colonial government of Leopold II reeling in horror.

The infuriating thing was sitting helplessly by and watching the UN get away with doing these things.  I have no idea why the United Nations still enjoys the kind of prestige that it does at that point.  It ranks as equal members first world democracies and third world kleptocrats.  It’s Human Rights Council is a by word for farce.  It’s a dumping ground for diplomats that couldn’t make it in their own countries diplomatic corps.  This is an oligarchy of bureaucrats with no one to answer to and yet, it pretends it’s the best that humanity has to offer.

As you may have guessed a book about United Nations high commissioners getting what they deserve is little short of porn to me…. I highly recommend it.

This is a particularly interesting review, because both the reviewer and the author definitely know very well whereof they write. And while it may strike those who have not yet read The Missionaries that I am perhaps overreacting to it or praising it too highly, all I can say is that you will simply have to read the book before reaching any such conclusion.

To put it plainly, no one writes books like this anymore. They don’t because they simply can’t; virtually none of today’s authors possess the necessary inside experience of the NGO world combined with an intrinsically skeptical outsider’s perspective on it. This is a unique snapshot of a specific point in time; just as Catch-22 could not have been written without Joseph Heller’s experience of war and all the madness of the military bureaucracy that goes with it, there is no one, besides Owen Stanley, who could have written this satirical take on the UN’s quixotic attempt to bring the modern world to the natives of Elephant Island.

UPDATE: Thank you all again, for making The Missionaries #1 in Satire. Not bad, considering that we are reliably informed that the editor doesn’t even know what it is. It is also #1 in Humor, and, I suspect those who have read it will agree, deservedly so.

 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509 Paid in Kindle Store
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Satire
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Satire

The Missionaries by Owen Stanley

The Missionaries is a story of the collision of three cultures. A
brilliant tale of ineptitude, self-righteousness, and human folly, it
combines the mordant wit of W. Somerset Maugham with a sense of humor
reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse.

When Dr. Sydney Prout is named the head of the United Nations
mission to Elephant Island, he believes he is more than ready to meet
the challenge of guiding its primitive inhabitants into the
post-Colonial era, and eventually, full independence. But neither his
many academic credentials nor the Journal of Race Relations have
prepared Dr. Prout to reckon with the unrepentant bloody-mindedness of
the natives, or anticipate the inventive ways their tribal philosophers
will incorporate the most unlikely aspects of modern civilization into
their religious lore and traditional way of life.

Author Owen Stanley is an Australian explorer, a philosopher, and a
poet who speaks seven languages. He is at much at home in the remote
jungles of the South Pacific as flying his Staudacher aerobatic plane,
deep-sea diving, or translating the complete works of Charles Darwin
into Tok Pisin.

We release a book or two every month, up to five or six if you include print editions and audiobooks. And while I always put up posts here to let you know about them, I seldom play favorites or make a hard pitch for a particular book.

But if you read just one Castalia House book, The Missionaries is the one you really ought to read. It is, in the collective opinion of everyone at Castalia involved in the production, one of the two best books we have published to date, the other one being John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, if not the best.


The Missionaries is not science fiction. It is not military strategy. It is neither history nor political philosophy, and while it does contain a single reference to gardening, it definitely isn’t anything an expert gardener such as David the Good would recommend. We didn’t even have an internal category in which to list the book except “fiction”. It’s the first purely literary novel we’ve published, and yet, it is exactly the sort of book Castalia House was created to publish in the first place, the kind of book that no other publisher would ever dare to touch. The Missionaries is a satirical novel in the vein of Evelyn Waugh or Joseph Heller and it is not an exaggeration to say it is capable of one day being considered a classic.

Owen Stanley’s debut novel is intelligent, it is erudite, it is educated, it is almost astonishingly offensive to delicate modern political sensibilities, and above all, it is funny. One would have to either be perfectly politically correct or totally devoid of any sense of humor to read this book without occasionally finding oneself laughing aloud, usually in disbelief. If you are a reader, then you must read this book. Seriously, it’s that good.

But you need not take my word for it. From the early reviews of The Missionaries:

  • The author, Owen Stanley, writes in a rich, flamboyant style that I
    associate with the best early to mid-20th century writers, but without
    overdoing it and spoiling the story with grandiose verbiage. 
  • The work at hand is strongly recommended as thought-provoking, crafted
    with tremendous skill and control, brilliant in its choice of targets,
    and uproariously absurd.
  •  The Missionaries is both a rollicking, rip-roaring, old-fashioned great white
    hunter adventure as well as a hilariously stinging modern satire.
  •  It’ll probably be the funniest book you read all year. 
  • This one is Castalia’s best yet.

UPDATE: Thank you! The Missionaries is now the #1 bestseller in Literary Satire.